On a quite grey and gloomy day on 3rd October 2020 I made a visit to RSPB Rainham Marsh which is just inside the boundary of London. Rather than enter the reserve immediately I walked along the River Thames where there were an intriguing group of gulls and waders which tricked me into thinking there might be something rare among them. Flocks of Common Teal, Black-tailed Godwit and Black-headed Gull were accompanied by smaller numbers of Common Redshank, Pied Avocet, Dunlin, Herring Gull and a single Curlew. A pleasant group of birds but lacking the scarcer autumn migrant I was hoping for. Birding through rough riverside habitat turned up very little so I attempted to photograph some of the birds feeding on the mud. Due to the poor light conditions and distance of the birds this was not very successful and at home I went through the photos and began deleting them until I came across a photograph of a Pied Avocet that revealed something interesting.

I have a lot of good photographs of Avocets from days when the light was better and I was able to get closer to these lovely birds so I was going to delete the above photo but I noticed that it had several colour rings on its legs. I have written a number of posts on reporting ringed birds so I was keen to report this one and receive information about its history but this one proved to be a bit harder to track down than many others I have reported.

Larger birds, such as gulls, often have a colour ring that has an alphanumeric code which are usually fairly easy to read and make finding the right ringing program not too challenging. However, working out the colours of the rings on the legs of this Avocet was not so obvious due to discolouration and dirt. After emailing a couple of ringing programs and finding that the colours did not match I narrowed it down to one last possibility based on the rings being yellow over blue on the left leg and yellow over white on the right leg.

These were not the colours I originally thought of but after getting some negative responses and searching through the European Colour-Ring Birding website where various colour combinations that have been used are listed, I got a positive reply which informed me that this bird had been ringed at Orfordness, Suffolk, UK on 26th May 2014 as a nestling with no other reports of it until my observation on the River Thames on 3rd October 2020, making it 6.5 years old.

A strange thing was that I was staying in a hotel in Aldburgh, within sight of Orfordness, when I read the email giving me the information. This observation turned what had been a fairly uneventful birding morning into an interesting one. Look out for colour ringed birds and you will find that receiving the information about the birds lives is interesting.